The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Recently at the science museum in London, they had a mockup of the passenger compartment. This could be what I get to ride in one day…. Once space travel comes down in price!

This is something that you won’t experience too often in America: Today, like most days on the bus, a woman next to me was speaking Russian (I think), another reading a book in Chinese, some kids speaking French, others behind me from Australia, and of course locals from England. That’s just today. I’m sure the mix will be different tomorrow.

Bikes and canals are everywhere in Amsterdam, so we walked along numerous canals and avoided getting run over by many bikes. I think it’s great that bicycles are a common form of transportation for all sorts of people. The architecture is fascinating to see, especially along the canals where the houses were built very skinny since taxes were paid by the canal-front property used. So you have very thin and long houses, and not always standing straight either. In addition to walking around quite a bit, we have seen the Van Gogh museum (you can see the brush strokes in his paintings), the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the red-light district on a crowded Saturday night, and I saw the Heineken Brewery museum where you get 3 beers and a bottle opener with the entry fee.
 

The other day, Anne and I took the opportunity to try out the slides at the Tate Modern. They give you a cloth to sit on with a bag at the bottom for your feet to go into, which is good, because it probably helps you slide better. But our tip for those who want to slide faster (which is fun) is to only have your butt touch the slide, not your legs and back. There are some good photos of the slide on the tate.org.uk site, but here are some of us. I never knew art was so much fun!

  

Microsoft and The British Library have teamed up and created something very cool: You can flip through very old and unique books online, but you do need to be running Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2. Here is a screenshot of flipping through Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex Arundel and a close-up of Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue, which is a manuscript of his compositions in the last seven years of his life, so you can see how he wrote music.  

 

It uses something called Turning The Pages. A description from http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp1.html is:

This preview version of Turning the Pages 2.0™ allows you to ‘virtually’ turn the pages of our most precious books. You can magnify details, read or listen to expert commentary on each page, and store or share your own notes.

Go to http://ttpdownload.bl.uk/ to try it out.

It snowed! We woke up Wedensday (Jan 24) morning and saw our first snow in London. Here is a photo of our street with snow on the cars and trees.

I wish it had snowed when we were in Chamonix!